Friday, February 14, 2014

Goodbye, Eric Holder?

Embattled Attorney General Eric Holder told the New Yorker magazine he plans to step down from his post later this year, but a Holder spokesman now denies he made any such commitment.

It’s just another confusing day in the increasingly chaotic Obama administration, where, as the president’s approval ratings continue to fall, the left hand never quite seems to know what the extreme-left hand is doing.

In an interview that appears in the New Yorker’s Feb. 17 issue, Holder told Jeffrey Toobin that he intends to remain in his position “well into” the year. Holder “told me that he will leave office sometime this year,” Toobin writes in the feature article.

Although Holder has been instrumental in protecting the Democratic Party’s voter fraud rackets, stirring up racial antagonism, covering up scandals such as Benghazi and the IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits, and keeping President Obama out of legal trouble, largely by lying and stonewalling, rumors have long persisted that the conservative-hating cabinet member was on his way out at the U.S. Department of Justice.

In what appears to be an inept attempt at semantic game-playing, a Department of Justice spokesman now claims Holder didn’t tell the New Yorker he was planning to resign. In damage control mode, DoJ spokesman Brian Fallon tried to spin away the resignation story by arguing that the attorney general did not explicitly say he would quit this year, but that he would stay “well into 2014.”

“The most the Attorney General has said is that he still has a lot he wants to accomplish on issues like criminal justice reform, voting rights and LGBT equality,” Fallon said. “He did not speak about his plans any further than that.”

Of course, an admission that Holder is staying “well into 2014″ isn’t exactly a denial that he’s resigning this year.

And any public utterance by a Justice Department official must be taken with a grain of salt.

In the Obama era DoJ spokespersons aren’t exactly known for their honesty. They openly collaborate with George Soros-funded slander shop Media Matters for America (MMfA). Investigative journalist Matthew Boyle discovered that Holder’s communications staff conspired with MMfA in what Boyle described as “an attempt to quell news stories about scandals plaguing Holder and America’s top law enforcement agency.” DoJ and MMfA also worked together to attack journalists covering DoJ scandals, Boyle found when he obtained internal government emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.

It is true that Holder told CBS News in November that he didn’t have “any plans” to step down but things change. With the attorney general’s mounting problems, now would be an opportune moment for Holder to leave.

Impeachment and removal from office following a trial in the Senate are also possibilities that are now being discussed on Capitol Hill. Twenty House members have introduced a formal impeachment resolution, H.Res. 411. The resolution’s four articles of impeachment accuse Holder of wrongdoing in connection with his involvement in the Fast and Furious scandal, refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, refusing to prosecute IRS officials who leaked confidential GOP donor tax information, and providing misleading testimony to Congress about whether he approved invasive investigative tactics against reporters like James Rosen of Fox News.

In June 2012, Eric Holder was held in criminal contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives in a 255-67 vote for refusing to turn over documents tied to the bungled Fast and Furious gun-running operation that left hundreds of people dead. That was the first time a U.S. attorney general had ever been held in criminal contempt by the House. Legal proceedings against Holder, arguably the most corrupt U.S. attorney general of all time, could be initiated after he leaves office.

Holder’s resignation announcement, if he did in fact make one in the New Yorker, comes as he leans on states to repeal laws preventing felons, a major Democratic Party constituency, from voting.

At worst, these laws, with their disparate impact on minority communities, echo policies enacted during a deeply troubled period in America’s past – a time of post-Civil War discrimination,” he said. “And they have their roots in centuries-old conceptions of justice that were too often based on exclusion, animus, and fear.

Predictably, it’s always about race and racism with Holder.

Of course Holder doesn’t care about civil rights enforcement unless it pertains to blacks and other Democratic interest groups, and is viscerally opposed to one of the key rights protected in the Bill of Rights, the right to keep and bear arms (Second Amendment). He said Americans should be “brainwash[ed]” into giving up their Second Amendment rights. People should be ashamed to own guns, just as tobacco users now “cower outside of buildings” to smoke, he said.

Holder is irredeemably corrupt. He doesn’t believe in race-neutral enforcement of laws. This is an incredibly dangerous position for the nation’s top law enforcement official to take, former DoJ insider and New York Times bestselling author J. Christian Adams argues:

Race-neutral enforcement of civil rights law is a principle nearly all Americans agree with. Equality before the law has been cherished since the founding, and a bloody Civil War sacrificed generations of treasure and life to enshrine race equality into constitutional law.

Yet the “Obama administration doesn’t believe some civil rights laws protect every American,” Adams says. Under President George W. Bush, the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division “was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,” but “during the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected.”

Leftists support this unequal enforcement of the law in lieu of slavery reparations being paid to descendants of slaves. Getting reparations approved by Congress is incredibly difficult politically, but affording preferential treatment to minorities is easy.

“[M]any of the advocates of limitless leveraging of government power for the benefit of traditional national minorities view this as a backdoor way to achieve reparations for slavery and discrimination,” according to Adams. “If the American public won’t tolerate monetary reparations, which they won’t, then a one-way approach to civil rights laws is seen as the next best alternative for their unpopular agenda. Best of all, hardly anybody notices.”

The hallmark of Holder’s tenure has been the radicalization of the Justice Department. If you have the wrong skin color, i.e. white, don’t bother asking Holder’s staff lawyers to help you.

This racial radicalism manifested itself early in Holder’s term of office.

As a DoJ lawyer, Adams and other officials brought a voter intimidation case against the uniformed, jackboot-wearing members of the New Black Panther Party who brandished a weapon and intimidated voters on Election Day 2008. DoJ “obtained an entry of default after the defendants ignored the case against them,” but “[b]efore a final judgment could be entered, however, our superiors ordered dismissal of the claims.”

The higher-ups at the Justice Department claim the “facts and law” did not support the case, but this is nonsense, Adams says.

Look at the race-obsessed radicals Obama selected to work under Holder, presumably with his approval.

Assistant attorney general Thomas Perez, who has since become Secretary of Labor, has refused to prosecute hate crimes committed against white Americans. He was reportedly instrumental in getting DoJ to drop the New Black Panther Party case and he led the Obama administration’s assault on voter ID laws. He was a board member of Casa de Maryland, an advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by George Soros and the late Marxist president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez.

And then there’s cop killer enthusiast Debo Adegbile, nominated to replace Perez at DoJ. President Obama’s nominee to be the nation’s top civil rights enforcer is a race-obsessed lawyer who tried to permanently free unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. Until fairly recently head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Adegbile, like Holder, is a staunch affirmative action supporter and doesn’t appear to believe that white Americans are entitled to civil rights protection. Last week a Senate committee barely approved his nomination on a 10 to 8 party-line vote.

Holder himself has bitterly denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act that gave the race-baiting ballot box stuffers of the Left a distinct advantage in federal elections. Written by Chief Justice John Roberts, it is essentially an official finding from the highest court in the land that America is not the racist swamp of leftist myth. The court finally recognized that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Act, which gave the federal government a veto over changes in state election laws, may have been needed when the law was enacted in 1965, but no longer.

Holder sent government-paid community organizers to Sanford, Florida, after the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in order to foment racial tensions. The Community Relations Service (CRS), a division of the DoJ, sent political agitators to Sanford to help organize marches in which participants exacerbated racial anxieties and loudly demanded that shooter George Zimmerman be prosecuted. For a month and a half after Martin’s death, local police declined to press charges against Zimmerman because they believed the criminal case against him was weak. But under pressure from the Left charges were eventually filed and local police chief Bill Lee was fired.

The litany of prosecutorial abuses and selective prosecutions under Holder grows.

There is the DoJ’s refusal to take up cases involving alleged civil rights victims when the victim is white.

There is also: the crackdown on Gibson Guitars; using federal resources to help anarchists and activists from the violent Occupy Wall Street movement agitate at the Republican National Convention in 2012; the DoJ’s flagrant manipulation of the 2012 election; the failure to investigate crimes committed by ACORN officials; the selective prosecution of Obama critic and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza for what are at worst very minor campaign finance law violations; and the selective prosecution of another filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, whose anti-Islam video was falsely accused of sparking the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

This is not an exhaustive list.

Meanwhile, Holder, America’s first black U.S. attorney general, knows that whatever he does in office, he is likely never going to be held to account. His misdeeds will not see the light of day because the Obama-worshipping media and opposition party lawmakers are either sympathetic to Obama’s agenda or are too afraid to confront the president and Holder out of fear of being tarred as racist.

The havoc Holder has created goes far beyond corruption on any single issue. The damage he has done crosses all components of the Department of Justice, and has trickled down to infect the systems of law and legal jurisprudence throughout the country. He has tried to transform the federal agency intended to be above politics into an institution advocating radical change and extreme remedies.

It needs to be said that the damage runs so deep that even if Holder resigns, it’s not clear if his departure would make much of a difference at the Justice Department, at least not while Barack Obama remains president.

As Adams has noted, the department is already infested with plenty of lawyers and officials who see the world the same way Holder does.

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About Me

An award-winning investigative journalist, Matthew Vadum is senior editor at Capital Research Center. His work is cited by Fox News, Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and many other media outlets. He's been on "The O'Reilly Factor," "CBS Evening News," "The Daily Show," and "The Colbert Report," and denounced by Al Sharpton, Oliver Stone, Roseanne Barr, and Keith Olbermann. Michelle Malkin hailed Vadum for having "the foresight and insight to report on the [ACORN] story when nobody else would." Glenn Beck said he finally "got it" when Vadum appeared on his Fox TV show to talk about ACORN, helping him draw one of his famous tree diagrams. Vadum "writes some of the harder edged and more influential briefings" in the conservative movement (Washington Post) and is a “conservative data hound" (Washington Independent).
Vadum is also Adjunct Scholar at the James Madison Institute. His report galvanized opposition to liberals' campaign to force a kind of affirmative action onto private grant-makers in Florida. According to National Review, it convinced the Florida legislature in 2010 to pass SB0998 which outlawed the "ACORNization" of philanthropy in that state.